Microelectronic devices generate heat as a result of the electrical activity of the internal circuitry. In order to reduce the damaging effects of this heat, thermal management systems have been developed to remove the heat. Such thermal management systems have included heat spreaders, fans, and various combinations that are adapted to thermally couple with the microelectronic device.
With the development of faster, more powerful, and more densely packed microelectronic devices such as processors, traditional methods of cooling may be ineffective, inefficient, or impractical. For example, the development of multi-core processors may create additional heat dissipation challenges. A traditional cooling system may not adequately cool a second processor, for example, that receives the pre-heated air from a first processor. Therefore, improvements are needed to cool faster processors that are increasingly used in multi-core environments.